A brilliant young scientist who created a new class of antibiotics that could save millions of lives and avert medical catastrophe has died at the age of just 29.

Kirsty Smitten was given just months to live after being diagnosed with heart cancer, a terminal disease so rare it affects just two people a year in the UK, in February and lost her fight for life in the early hours of October 4.

She had been undergoing treatment at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham for seven weeks before her death. Her family was by her bedside during her final hours.

Her sister-in-law, Sukhi Smitten, wife of her older brother, Matt, said: 'Kirsty fought to the very end but this was such an aggressive cancer she couldn't beat it.